Enlightenment Through Understanding

anti-democracy

Social Matter lists six fundamental flaws of democracy: 1. Long to non-existent feedback cycles for political actions 2. Incentives to destroy people’s belief-forming faculties, or what I call full-spectrum weaponization 3. Reduced incentives to do the right things to get status on both top and…

The Arabs figured out that the best way to deal with politics is to eliminate it altogether. But other countries–Brazil, France, Turkey, and America–still have their elections and referendums, along with the usual fanfare that goes along with it. America at least got it half-right…

The legacy of Trump presidency may be one the greatest examples of voter ignorance or dissonance–by many pundits the ‘right’ who originally supported Trump but later realized he wasn’t who they thought he was…whoops. With Bush (1st and 2nd), it was obvious what you were…

There seems to be lingering belief held by some, including even a the Flight 93 Election essay, that perhaps democracy can be salvaged if only the ‘right people are put in charge’, or that Trump’s win is a major setback for the left. Bloody Shovel…

This article is going viral right now on Hacker News: In Praise of Passivity, by Michael Huemer of the University of Colorado. Political actors, including voters, activists, and leaders, are often ignorant of basic facts relevant to policy choices. Even experts have little understanding of…

And for some good news, maybe we’re closer to the ‘dark enlightenment’ than commonly believed, with democracy being mostly a facade. From Taki: Aborting the Working Class Martin Gilens is a political-science professor at Princeton. Over the course of the past decade, he has authored…

In earlier posts I explore the possibility millennials are smarter and less impressionable than earlier generations. Some on the left argue millennials are sloppy at grammar and are careless, but there is an abundance of evidence to the contrary. For example on Reddit this user…

Soul and skin in the game So voters are irrational, voting based on emotion than ‘good’ policy. This is not new, Bryan Caplan having written extensively about this. But the difference is Caplan uses this as an argument against democracy, whereas Taleb sees it as…

This is great news for the ‘alt right’ cause: Are Americans losing faith in democracy? Most millennials don’t think it’s essential to live in a democracy: If you wonder why I write to much about Reddit and Millennials – this is why. There is a…

From Peter A. Taylor The Resurrection of Classical Liberalism Here’s what I think happened. The US began as an expression of classical liberalism. The founders were steeped in John Locke’s ideas about natural rights, as modified and popularized by writers like James Otis, Thomas Paine,…